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- Johns Hopkins University Press
Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000-1400
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Key Metrics
- Steven A Epstein
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780801884849
- 9.3 X 6.3 X 0.94 inches
- 1.08 pounds
- History > Middle East - General
- English
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Book Description
Purity Lost investigates the porous nature of social, political, and religious boundaries prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean--from the Black Sea to Egypt--during the Middle Ages. In this intriguing study, Steven A. Epstein finds that people consistently defied, overlooked, or transcended restrictions designed to preserve racial and cultural purity in order to establish relationships with those different from themselves.
These mixed relationships--among people who did not share language, creed, or skin color--undermined the pervasive claims of purity. They forced people to reflect on their own identities and the bonds--whether social, political, religious, or racial--that defined their lives. Drawing on examples from daily life and interstate politics, Epstein takes a close look at the renegades and rule-breakers of this era. He explores race, master/slave relationships, diplomatic relations between Christian Italians and Muslim Turks, religious conversions from Christian to Muslim and vice versa, and religious boundaries of the human and the angelic.
Epstein reveals the modern view of cultural, ethnic, and religious purity in the early modern Mediterranean as a mirage, and he offers new insights into how present-day conceptions about creed, color, ethnicity, and language originated.
Author Bio
Professor Epstein is a faculty member at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; a faculty affiliate of the Science in Human Culture Program and of the interdisciplinary graduate cluster in Science Studies; a faculty affiliate in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program; a faculty associate in Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health at the Institute for Policy Research, and a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.
He is also a co-founder of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). Before joining the Northwestern faculty in 2009, Epstein spent the preceding 15 years on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. He is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, residency fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a total of eight book prizes. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Professor Epstein studies the “politics of knowledge”—more specifically, the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. He is especially known for two books: Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago, 2007), which received multiple awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award; and Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California, 1996), which also received multiple awards, including the C. Wright Mills Prize.
He also co-edited Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions (Johns Hopkins, 2010), and he coauthored Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America’s Communities (Rutgers, 1989). Epstein has published in such journals as Social Studies of Science, Body & Society, Sociological Forum, Social Science & Medicine, Theory and Society, and Sexualities.
Epstein’s newest book, The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in February of 2022. The book investigates the diverse initiatives that pursue sexual health—an evocative yet elusive goal. At least since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, foundations, commercial interests, and many individuals increasingly have embraced the quest for sexual health, and this aspiration has served as an engine of productivity.
Behind this banner, a wide array of programs have been launched, investigations undertaken, and commodities sold. From sexually transmitted infections to sexual dysfunction to sexual harassment to reproductive health to sexual rights to the market in sexual wellness products, sexual health now signals urgent concerns and substantial investments. It has fueled varied attempts to solve social problems, propelled an array of projects to improve medical care and expand knowledge, and encouraged individuals to “self-optimize” and governments to undertake campaigns of social improvement. Meanwhile, it has become a political battleground where the stakes are competing visions of the future.
The Quest for Sexual Health analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities. Conjoining “sexual” with “health” changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality but also transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. The book provides critical tools to assess a range of potential consequences of the investment in sexual health and to consider how those consequences vary across groups and identities.
By exploring debates about the defining of normality, the roles of experts of different sorts, and the relative emphases placed on risk and pleasure when considering sexual matters, it seeks to identify pathways that promote pleasure, equality, and social justice.
Epstein currently serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology, & Human Values. He is a past chair of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. At Northwestern, he and Prof. Héctor Carrillo co-founded the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), an initiative that promotes interdisciplinary research and education on sexuality and health in social context. SPAN funds faculty and graduate student research, holds a postdoctoral fellowship competition, and organizes workshops and reading groups, among other activities.
Research Interests
Science, Knowledge, and Technology; Health and Biomedicine; Sexualities; Social Movements; Theory; Culture; Inequalities
Education
- A.B., Harvard College (Magna cum Laude in Social Studies), 1983
M.A., University of California, Berkeley (Sociology), 1987
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (Sociology), 1993
Source: Northwestern University
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